Today I heard a lecture where the speaker was talking about "contents" as a word for "topics." For example, she'd say something like, "the contents for this area would be safety, quality and interprofessionalism." Somehow it struck me as wrong, but then you can talk about the table of contents or the the contents of a box.

What do you think?

I would only use contents to refer to tangibles, not ideas or concepts. A table of contents is a list of the chapters in a book and the contents of a box are the items in it.

For concepts such as those you cite, I would agree that "topics" would be a better choice of descriptor.

Language Log has a couple of posts (here and here) about Harper's Magazine's use of the word content. It's not the same as contents, admittedly, but the thought processes may be the same.

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Originally posted by Richard English:
I would only use contents to refer to tangibles,

So if you spilled the contents in a civilized manner, you'd get a book by Freud: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C..._and_Its_Discontents

Wow, I would never have understood that definition of "content-free," arnie. Nice link!

Personally I think LL is sometimes getting a bit picky lately. I understood the jocular reference of "content free" immediately. It never even occurred to me until LL brought it up that it COULD be misunderstood.

It means something like "Other magazines call what they have 'content' which is a misnomer because they have little genuine content, only light fluffy nonsense. We, on the other hand, refuse to call the things in our magazine 'content' because then we'd be compared with them and the serious in depth journalism that we produce is so much more worthy."

And that's what I understood immediately, in context, by "we are content free".

I would use the word "content" (meaning something contained, not meaning happy) in a different way from the way in which I'd use the word "contents".

For me contents are, as I wrote, tangibles. I would speak of fewer contents, but less content.

For me, content is a mass noun (link) and its plural, contents, is a count noun (link). When I speak of the contents of a magazine, I mean the individual and countable articles, ads, etc., but when I speak of the content of a magazine, I am talking about its subject matter, meaning, etc.

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Personally I think LL is sometimes getting a bit picky lately. I understood the jocular reference of "content free" immediately. It never even occurred to me until LL brought it up that it COULD be misunderstood.

I don't know about "lately," but I don't think LL was too picky on this one, at least from my perspective in nursing education. We often talk about the necessary content to teach, and something "content free" would not be appropriate.

Yes, z, I see what you mean. In the instance I brought up the speaker referred to the "content" to be included in a module. While there would be individual parts, to call the individual topics "contents" just didn't sound right to me. It reminded me of my Chinese friend who used to say, "I've had too many alcohols."

Maybe I have become too picky, too.

But isn't everybody kind of missing the point that the "content free" was a joke?

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Printing contents of a window?

What OS? In the Preview app in SL you can go to "Take Screen Shot" under the File menu and it gives you choices of "Entire Screen", "Window" or "Selection". Then just print the image.